#and Zod being more of a Greater Scope Villain with his influence having heavy repercussions on the narrative

[someoneoffthestreet]

MAWS s2 thoughts before the finale:

I’ve been thinking over what we’ve seen of Krypton this season. Mostly how, even though it feels like a lot, we haven’t actually seen much at all.

Notably, most of the information we have received about Krypton is actually sourced from Brainiac, which- well. Brainiac is a certified liar, or at the very least, has a very skewed perspective of Krypton and what it was supposed to be. I do not doubt that Krypton was at one point a warmongering planet that benefited off of others’ suffering (Jor-El’s account backs this up,) but dialogue from Brainiac in 2x08 suggests that, towards the end at least, Krypton was moving away from this and pursuing a more peaceful existence.

(Speculatively, this could have angered some Kryptonians ((it’s been 20-something years and Brainiac still sounds pissed off about it)) and instigated a coup that then led to the attempted invasions against Darkseid/Apokolips and Earth, and we know how that went.)

The images we see of Krypton show the Kryptonians with superpowers on their home planet. But we don’t? Actually know? If that’s completely true?? Because it seems strange that the show would have this, but keep the red sun weakness. Did Krypton not have a red sun in this universe?

Pushing on that, the images of that Krypton are from the Black Mercy, which Kara outright states is Brainiac’s domain. The world Clark is trapped in is based off of the one Kara shows him in 2x05, but we don’t actually know where that vision originated from. It couldn’t have come from Kara, because she was also an infant when Krypton was destroyed and would have no natural memory of it. So whose memory is that? Is it a memory at all? How do we know Brainiac didn’t tamper with it?

(Like in all likelihood it was just a throwaway line, but my brain keeps getting stuck on Clark noticing Ma and Pa’s doppelgängers in Kara’s Krypton, and I keep wondering if maybe that was a result of Clark’s subconscious infecting the simulation because it isn’t an actual, tangible memory, but Kara doesn’t seem to notice anything unusual with the memory so maybe I’m stuck on nothing.)

More on that, is how all of this interacts with what we see of Krypton from Jor-El’s memories. Admittedly he gives us very little, but the contrast is pretty stark. And maybe it’s just because the planet was mere moments from exploding, but the Krypton we see back in 1x02 is a wreck, in very stark contrast to the peaceful paradise that was Krypton’s Last Days as shown in 2x05. Even more notably, neither Lara nor Jor-El do anything superhuman in Jor-El’s account. Think about that. They are rushing to save their infant son’s life, but they aren’t using flight or super speed: they are very much earthbound.

Now to be fair, there’s another explanation. Krypton was already a spacefaring civilization before the fall, so they definitely discovered how their biology reacted to different suns. Maybe they created some kind of device that could simulate the yellow sun on Krypton (like the red solar shielding around Cadmus in s1) that “blessed” all Kryptonians with superpowers; and then this device was damaged/shut off in the time before the planet’s destruction.

Like it could be both: the above point being true and Brainiac still omitting/manipulating things about how Krypton was, maybe to better preserve his idea of what it should have been.